Most companies publish financial information in one form or another. For example, publicly traded United States companies are typically required to report financial information to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) quarterly, annually, and at other times. Company financial information may be published electronically, for example, on a company or SEC web site, or may be published in other forms. Financial reports for many United States and foreign public and private companies are available through the SEC EDGAR system. The financial reports typically include line items for various assets, liabilities, and other financial information, and can be useful in evaluating and monitoring company performance. One issue with company financial reports is that different companies often use different terminology to report the same or similar types of financial information. For example, one company might report certain assets using a term like “refundable income taxes,” while another company might report the same information using a term like “overpaid income taxes.” The use of different terminology to report the same types of information can make it difficult to analyze company performance or compare the performance of different companies.
One solution has been to manually generate a standardized financial report for each company by mapping each company-specific term from the company's financial report to a corresponding standard term in the standardized financial report. For example, the terms “refundable income taxes” and “overpaid income taxes” from above might be mapped to a standard term called “income tax receivable.” In this way, the standardized financial report for each of those companies would include a line item called “income tax receivable” showing the amount from the corresponding line item in the respective financial report, making it easier to compare the finances of the two companies. While such manual mapping of financial terms tends to normalize the financial information, it is extremely tedious and often takes days to complete.